A Cardinal, A Jew, the Son of an Immigrant

In Paradísum dedúcant te ángeli,

in tuo advéntu suscípiant te mártyres,

et perdúcant te in civitátem sanctam Jerúsalem.

Chorus angelórum te sucípiat, et cum Lázaro

quondam paúpero aetérnam hábeas réquiem.

Cardinal Lustiger, who died on Sunday aged 80, was the only Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism to become a French bishop in modern times.

Lustiger became a Catholic at 14 during the early days of the German Occupation, and lost his mother two years later when she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz , where she died. He saw his conversion as a natural progression, believing that Christianity and Judaism were "indissolubly linked" and that "the New Testament was hidden within the Old and the Old Testament came to light in the New", since Christ was the Messiah of Israel.

Lustiger's prominent role as a Jewish convert was strongly condemned both in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora. This hostility reached its height in 1995 when he was invited to address a conference at the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv on "God's silence during the Holocaust". The Chief (Ashkenazi) Rabbi disrupted his visit to Israel by publicly accusing him of "betraying his people and his religion".

Lustiger, deeply hurt by this attack, replied that it was the first time he had ever heard that it was "worse to be baptised than to commit the crimes of Hitler".

Aaron Lustiger was born in Paris on September 17 1926, the oldest child and only son of Charles and Giselle Lustiger, who kept a hat shop in Montmartre . His parents, emigrants from Poland , had started selling goods from a street stall before prospering and taking French citizenship. Although the children's grandfather had been a rabbi, they were given no religious instruction and had a secular upbringing.

The family spoke French at home, but the parents spoke Yiddish if they did not wish their children to understand. The Lustigers moved to an apartment in the 5th arrondissement, and Aaron attended the Lycée Montaigne, where he showed great ability in literature and languages.
In 1937 he was sent to stay in Germany with an anti-Nazi Protestant family whose son was in the Hitler Youth. Thinking that their visitor was a Gentile, the boy showed Lustiger a dagger, confiding that the Hitler Youth intended to kill "all the Jews in Germany during the summer solstice".

When young, Lustiger wanted to become a doctor. He later described himself as "a proud child with a difficult personality". His mother forbade him to read comics and his father would not let him leave the house during Christian festivals. But the boy read the Bible secretly, and later said that he had the impression that he was "reading something he already knew".

On the outbreak of war in 1939 the family left Paris , hoping to find a refuge in Orléans. During Holy Week in 1940 Aaron Lustiger disobeyed his father's instructions, and for the first time visited a church (Orléans cathedral), feeling a strong attraction to the empty building.

On returning the following day, Good Friday, he decided to convert. He was instructed by the Bishop of Orléans and baptised as Aaron Jean-Marie. His parents reluctantly consented to his conversion, believing that it was a sensible precaution to take in 1941.

Leaving his children in Orléans, Lustiger's father moved to the Unoccupied Zone while his mother returned to Paris to run the shop. When the round-ups of Parisian Jews started in 1942, Giselle Lustiger was denounced by the family maid, who wanted to take over the apartment. When Giselle was arrested by the French police, the Bishop of Orléans arranged for Jean-Marie to live at a seminary outside Paris , where he passed his baccalauréat. Later he rejoined his father and sister in the south of France , where the family remained in hiding until the Liberation.

After the war Lustiger's father, assisted by the Chief Rabbi of Paris , tried to get his son's baptism annulled on the ground that Aaron had converted for empirical reasons, an argument that Jean-Marie strongly denied. Lustiger entered the Sorbonne University , where he decided to become a priest, a decision that caused a complete rift with his father. In the seminary Lustiger was later remembered as a stubborn and insubordinate student.

Following his ordination in 1954 Fr Jean-Marie became assistant chaplain to the Sorbonne and then general chaplain to the universities of Paris . In 1969 he was given his first parish, St Jeanne de Chantal in the 16th arrondissement, from which his fame as a preacher spread. He usually spoke without notes and with a sincerity, humour and intelligence that quickly increased the size of the Sunday congregation.

Lustiger's time as a young priest was dominated by the leading intellects of French Catholicism - Henri de Lubac, François Mauriac, Paul Claudel and Jacques Maritain - and he set out to be worthy of that tradition.

He eventually wrote 16 books in which he argued that where Christian anti-Semitism existed it was a consequence of the infidelity of Christian nations to Biblical Judaism. He traced modern anti-Semitism back to the Enlightenment, to the anti-Semitism of Voltaire, Diderot and Hegel, and to the preference for individual reason over the teaching of Christ.

Rationalism he dismissed for its pretensions and its failure to answer the ultimate questions facing mankind. The great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was so impressed by Lustiger's published sermons that he translated them into German to add to his earlier translations of Pascal, Péguy and Claudel.

Lustiger's ability and unusual background soon attracted the attention of the papal nuncio, and in 1979 Jean-Paul II made him a surprise choice as Bishop of Orléans. This appointment was the start of a warm friendship with the Pope who, after only 13 months, promoted Lustiger to the archbishopric of Paris .

Charles Lustiger, who had watched his son's remarkable progress without enthusiasm, died the following year, by which time father and son had been reconciled and were able to pray together. Archbishop Lustiger asked a cousin to say the Kaddish over his father's grave in the cemetery of Montparnasse , although the funeral service had to be cut short because of a bomb warning.
Lustiger was appointed a cardinal in 1982. He took part in the papal conclave of 2005, by which time he was too ill to be considered papabile; but if Pope John-Paul II had died younger, Lustiger would certainly have been among the favourites to succeed.

As Archbishop of Paris he was a restless reformer, determined to increase the number of ordinations. After falling out with the rector of the existing seminary he opened his own; and, in the course of time, he ordained 200 priests. These represented 15 per cent of the French total, drawn from a diocese which had two per cent of the population.

He was suspected of bearing some responsiblity for an incident during Pope John Paul II's visit to France in 1986 when the entire French clergy were summoned to the remote country parish of Ars, near Lyon . Once seated they were given a blistering lecture by the Pope, while Lustiger's raucous seminarians, seated in the front row, roared their approval.

Despite his outstanding ability, the French hierarchy never elected Lustiger to the presidency of the national bishops' conference, though he was compensated for this slight in 1995 when he was elected by the Académie Française to the seat formerly occupied by the Cardinal Primate of France .

Lustiger's first political test had come in 1984 under François Mitterrand's first presidency, when the anti-clerical minister of education, Alain Savary, tried to pass a law restricting the rights of Catholic schools. Lustiger confronted Mitterrand at an icy meeting in the Elysée Palace that was followed by a peaceful march of 800,000 Catholic protestors. Shortly afterwards Savary resigned and the bill was abandoned.

Subsequently, Lustiger played a prominent role in dissuading the Carmelite order from building a controversial convent at Auschwitz, and in the French bishops' public apology in 1997 for their predecessors' failure to protest against the Vichy government's anti-Semitic laws. The latter was at the site of the Drancy concentration camp from which Lustiger's mother had been deported.
Earlier the same year Lustiger had presided over Mitterrand's state funeral; a delicate business since the Socialist Party was opposed to a service at Notre Dame while Mitterrand's family insisted on one. Eventually, 84 heads of state attended a ceremony that had everything except the body of the deceased, which was present at a private family ceremony held simultaneously at Jarnac, a small town far from Paris .

One of the last acts of Pope John-Paul II was to accept Lustiger's resignation as archbishop of Paris , because of ill health, in 2005.

Lustiger summarised his own life by saying that he had been "a cardinal, a Jew and the son of an immigrant".